[Note I'm not in the Working Group, just a fellow Test suite user]
> There are still many "import schema" declarations in MinimalConformance
> tests (around 250, nearly 2%).
>
In addition to that there are many more which don't explictly import a
schema but have hidden dependency on schema support as the expected
result files assume that the input tree has type annotations from schema
validation.
I've argued often that all these schema dependencies should be removed.
> These tests will always fail with an implementation that does not
> support Schema:
This isn't strictly true as the test suite guidelines allow you to
change the schema import to a namespace declaration before running the
test. So it is possible to pass some of those tests.
http://www.w3.org/XML/Query/test-suite/Guidelines%20for%20Running%20the%20XML%20Query%20Test%20Suite.html
> This declaration can be customized in one of the following three ways:
>
> 1. Unchanged: use schema import as indicated in the original query
> 2. Remove the schema import declaration from the query, and add
> namespace declaration using same name and URI to statically known
> namespaces before the query is executed.
> 3. Replace schema import with namespace declaration using same name
> and URI.
This licence to change the query text is not particularly helpful though,
and I strongly urge that it be _removed_ from the guidelines.
See bug
http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=2666
for the most recent of several bug reports in this area.
If changing the schema import to a namespace declaration allows the test
to run correctly then the schema dependency is spurious, so the test
should be changed as distributed just to use a namespace declaration.
If changing the schema import to a namespace declaration causes the
test to fail (as it requires type or element declarations) then
suggesting that implementors make this change before running the test is
just misleading and unhelpful. The test needs to be moved to the
optional schema import section of the test suite.
David